Racial Inequities Cost U.S. Economy Trillions, Researchers Find

Racial and ethnic inequities have cost the U.S. economy some $51 trillion in lost output since 1990, San Francisco Federal Reserve President Mary Daly said Wednesday, citing data from a paper she and three co-authors will present at The Brookings Institution.

Large and persistent gaps in rates of employment, education, and earnings across races “add up to a smaller economic pie for the nation as a whole,” Daly said in a briefing ahead of the paper’s release Thursday.

“The imperative for equity, for closing some of these gaps, is not only a moral one, but it’s also an economic one.”

The paper maps out what GDP would have been if gaps in the labor market didn’t exist.

Employment for Black men, for instance, is consistently lower than that for men of other races.

Earnings by Black and Hispanic workers also lag those of whites.

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